Toward Fabric
Sayed Hadi Hashemi, Shadi A. Noghabi, John Bellessa, Roy H. Campbell · 2016
Many in the networking community believe that Software-Defined Networking, in which entire networks are managed centrally, has the potential to revolutionize the field. However, SDN faces several challenges that have prevented its wide-spread adoption. Current SDN technologies, such as OpenFlow, provide powerful and flexible APIs, but can be unreasonably complex for implementing nontrivial network control logic. The generality offered by these low-level abstractions impose no structure on the network, requiring programmers to herd switches themselves, with little guidance. Many researchers argue that SDNs must adopt more structured models, such as Fabric, with an intelligent edge and a fast but simple label-switched core. Our work draws heavily from these ideas.